Securing CoAP through payload encryption: Using elliptic curve cryptography

Abstract

The vision of the IoT is to not only make our everyday lives easier but also at the same time to ensure a secure environment. As the networking world moves closer towards an environment comprising of minimalistic ubiquitous nodes, IoT-based protocols cannot afford to accommodate security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we identify and mitigate the existing security flaws in the CoAP protocol of the IoT. A real-time system is developed to put the mitigated system into use and analyze the enhanced security. Additionally, we quantitatively look to evaluate the vulnerability of current implementation of CoAP and the magnitude of mitigation the method suggested in this paper provides. A secondary quantitative measure is used to prove that the overhead of the applied encryption is acceptable in terms of efficiency for the mitigation achieved.